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The Commentary on Female Self-Discipline in Susanna

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The Commentary on Female Self-Discipline in Susanna THE COMMENTARY ON FEMALE SELF-DISCIPLINE IN SUSANNA ROWSON’S CHARLOTTE TEMPLE AND HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER’S THE COQUETTE by JIN KIM Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2011 Copyright © by Jin Kim 2011 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my teachers, friends and family, and I would like to acknowledge them in this space. I am grateful to my director, Dr. Desirée Henderson, for helping me to persist throughout the writing process. She helped me fight my desire to give up with her patience and warmth, paired with timely and clear instructions. She encouraged me to believe in my ideas whenever I let self-doubt paralyze me. I am also thankful to Dr. Neill Matheson and Dr. James Warren for agreeing to be on my committee with nothing but generous encouragement, even though I postponed the defense a number of times. I must also thank Ms. Ruth Gerik who edited earlier drafts and gave me timely feedback, urging me to constantly think of the reader when I am writing. It was also because of the kind and supportive teachers and friends that I could finish the coursework and rally the courage to even start writing a thesis. Dr. Laurin Porter, Dr. Kevin Porter, Dr. Jacqueline Stodnick, Dr. Kenneth Roemer, and Dr. Mary French encouraged me to participate in their classes during the time when I had a hard time overcoming the embarrassment at my own speech loaded with stutters and awkward pauses. I am grateful to Tracey-Lynn Clough, Katherine Jones, and Ronni Davis for helping me in various ways to adjust to life as a graduate student. These teachers and colleagues often gave me a reason to look forward to going to classes and conferences, and I am very grateful for that. I am also indebted to Prof. Chang-ku Byun, Prof. Gyung-ryul Jang, and Prof. Chul-won Cho at Seoul National University for their generous support, especially when I first came to the United States and began to apply to English graduate programs. They not only recommended iii me to the program at UTA but provided me with guidance and support when I most needed them. I need to give my sincere gratitude to Da-san Kim, Yeon-i Cho, Ja-kyeong Kim, Jae-won Woo, and Hyeon-soo Jang, who answered my calls and listened throughout my complaints about life in general and never failed to give me sage advice, when they, themselves, were juggling many tasks as foreign students in the States. I consider the day that I met my roommate Orathai Thumthan (Koi) and her friends one of the luckiest days of my life. While I tended to seclude myself when writing, Koi, Chivarat Muangphat, Natchanok Pala-En, Surat Chumjit, Rachaneewan Charoenwat, and Supatsara Khunsri invited me to various excursions to parks, fairs, and their own houses, feeding me amazing homemade food. I cannot begin to explain how they kept me sane through difficult times. Perhaps, most of all, I thank my family. I thank my parents, Hae-ryong Kim and Mi-wha Kim, for their endless patience and love for me. Writing this thesis brought out some of the worst aspects of my personality, and I was simply awed by my parents’ readiness to listen to me and call me out on my nonsense, but still leave no doubt that they stood by me. I am also lucky to have my brother, Ji-moon Kim, whose supreme inventiveness in seeing the good and fun in everyday life has always inspired me to do the same. I am very grateful to have my family. Thank you. April 13, 2011 iv ABSTRACT THE COMMENTARY ON FEMALE SELF-DISCIPLINE IN SUSANNA ROWSON’S CHARLOTTE TEMPLE AND HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER’S THE COQUETTE Jin Kim, M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2011 Supervising Professor: Desirée Henderson This thesis studies Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette to explore the embedded commentary about the discourse of female self- discipline in the two novels. As two best-selling seduction stories in post-Revolutionary America, Charlotte Temple and The Coquette have often been discussed in terms of what the authors assert about the cultural emphasis on women’s virtue in the early Republic through their stories about a young woman suffering and dying as a result of seduction and abandonment. In this thesis, I argue that Rowson and Foster use their narratives to study the particular rhetoric of rewards that was used in conduct writings on female self-discipline widely read in late eighteenth-century America. Propagating the tenets of women’s self-discipline, conduct writers presented moral autonomy and supportive friendship as two rewards to the woman who successfully proved herself as a self-regulating, virtuous woman. Using the narrator figure and the epistolary form respectively, Rowson and Foster modify the heroine-centered seduction plot to build their narratives in a parallel structure, in which they study and question the viability and the logical cogency of this rhetoric of rewards of conduct writers. By elucidating this questioning v of the rhetoric of conduct writers in the two novels, I aim to shed light on both the cultural commentary about female self-discipline in Charlotte Temple and The Coquette and the structural machinations working in each novel to accommodate such a commentary. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................... v Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………..………..….. ..................................... 1 2. THE DISCOURSE OF FEMALE SELF-DISCIPLINE AND THE RHETORIC OF REWARDS ........................................................................................................................ 11 3. CHARLOTTE TEMPLE ............................................................................................... 34 4. THE COQUETTE ......................................................................................................... 57 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 80 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................................. 84 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION .................................................................................................. 87 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In this thesis, I analyze Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791; 1794) and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) for the embedded commentary about the discourse of female self-discipline in post-Revolutionary America. Charlotte Temple and The Coquette were the two best-selling American novels published in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Charlotte Temple , the story of a young British woman who is seduced by a soldier and follows him to America, was widely read in America after its first American publication in 1794 and by 1805 had gone through sixteen editions. The Coquette , another story that featured a seduced woman’s fate, also enjoyed a widespread popularity, becoming the “second best-selling novel before the nineteenth century” (Bontatibus 4). Early readers bought the two novels or borrowed them from subscription or circulating libraries, and read them solitarily or in groups until the copies fell apart (Davidson Revolution 232). The two novels’ popularity has attracted scholarly attention about why late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American readers found them particularly engaging and read them relentlessly. Charlotte Temple and The Coquette have been discussed particularly in terms of their relevance to the life of the young woman reader in the new nation, who was addressed as the primary intended reader in not only these two novels but many other novels of the period. This study joins the existing scholarship on the relationship between women’s lives in post-Revolutionary America and Charlotte Temple and The Coquette . More specifically, this study aims to identify within Charlotte Temple and The Coquette a commentary about the discourse of women’s self-discipline, which had a strong impact on women’s lives in the early national period, by reviewing the function of a unique narrative structure that is found in both novels. 1 Because these works are the central focus of this project, a brief summary of each is in order. Charlotte Temple, the heroine of Rowson’s novel, is an obedient daughter of virtuous parents and a student in a female boarding school. Her sheltered life begins to decline when she falls in love with a British soldier Montraville and follows him to America where he is sent to fight in the Revolutionary War. In America, Charlotte has no social identity except that of a “mistress” of a man who does not marry her as she believed he would. Through the ill-will of Belcour, Montraville’s fellow officer and one of the novel’s main villains, and Montraville’s gullibility, Charlotte eventually becomes a pregnant pauper who dies in a working man’s house in New York City, across the Atlantic from her parent’s house. Eliza Wharton, the heroine of The Coquette , also has an unscrupulous man in her life who is eventually blamed by everyone in her acquaintance for her fall to disgrace. As a minister’s daughter
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